As the traffic in communication systems continues to grow rapidly, particularly for video, mobile data, and cloud services, advanced modulation formats offering higher spectral efficiency (SE), such as 16 QAM have been considered to increase the total fiber capacity to meet the demand. However, higher modulation orders increase an implementation penalty and decrease receiver sensitivity, resulting in a higher required optical signal to noise ratio (OSNR). To avoid this higher requirement, another approach SE in WDM systems is to reduce the channel spacing between the individual channels, by either relying on orthogonality among neighboring channels in frequency domain (Coherent Optical OFDM) or in time domain (Nyquist WDM).
The CO-OFDM may require a larger receiver bandwidth and a higher analog-to-digital converter (ADC) sampling rate than Nyquist WDM. However, Nyquist WDM shows a more robust performance in terms of practical implementation. FIG. 1 shows the two technologies. It would be advantageous to implement a Nyquist WDM transmission system with coherent detection.